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Working families to be hit if Trump elected: Clinton

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Press Trust of India Washington
Democratic presidential front runner Hillary Clinton has warned that working families will suffer due to a drop in their net income if presumptive Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is elected as the US president.

"I think with somebody like Donald Trump, you would see a race to the bottom across our country, with working families paying the price. And I don't think that's a risk we can afford," Clinton, 68, said.

"We have to reject that vision and instead come up with a much more positive one for families and children," Clinton said in an address to her supporters in Louisville, Kentucky as she capped her two-day visit focusing on families and children.
 

Clinton visited a family health clinic in Louisville where she committed to capping family child care costs and expanding home-visiting programmes for parents of young children.

"The parents I've met over the past few days and parents that I've met over the past many years may come from different backgrounds, they may earn different incomes. They're Democrats and Republicans, but they're facing the same challenges and they desperately want to give their kids a good life and they are needing help to deal with the pressures. It shouldn't be about politics. It should be about families," she said.

Clinton also announced a new comprehensive child care proposal which would increase child care investments so no family pays more than 10 per cent of their income for child care.

The plan will create a new initiative to fund and support states and local communities that work to increase the compensation of child care providers and early educators, as well as provide home visiting services to more than two million parents and children in the next decade by doubling the national investment in evidenced-based home visiting initiatives.

"We are in the middle of a presidential election right now, and there are real differences between what I believe, what we believe, and what the presumptive Republican nominee believes because at a time when families are struggling to pay for childcare and so much else, Donald Trump actually stood on a debate stage and argued that Americans are being paid too much, not too little," Clinton said.

"He's even talking about getting rid of the federal minimum wage, leaving it totally to the states, to the mercy of Republican governors, who have already cut the minimum wage for state workers. And that's happened right here in Kentucky," she said.

"It's troubling to me because if you're going to grow the economy, I think it's kind of obvious you want people to be making money so that they can actually spend it and put it back into the economy. Donald Trump wants to get rid of the Affordable Care Act," Clinton added.

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First Published: May 12 2016 | 4:22 AM IST

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